A World-Class Omakase in America’s Most Landlocked State
Many of the commercial strips in Omaha, a city of about half a million people, have the air of a nineties college town, with low-slung blocks of row houses punctuated by dive bars and cafés, thrift stores and record shops. If the city is known for anything, food-wise, it’s beef; from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, it was a hub of American cattle trading and meatpacking, home to one of the largest livestock markets in the world. The Reuben sandwich may or may not have been invented in Omaha (New York lays claim to it, too), and the city’s iconic restaurants are mostly steak houses, such as the Drover, a sixty-year-old Midwestern time capsule with a full salad bar and whiskey-marinated fillets.
The sense that Omaha might be underestimated, even by the people who live there, is a source of both pride and torment for Utterback. We’d first met in Los Angeles, a city whose sushi doesn’t particularly impress him, a few months prior to my visit; he travels widely to meet other chefs and invite them to Omaha to eat and collaborate. “In Omaha—and outside of Omaha, too—there’s this assumption that, because something exists in a bigger city, it’s inherently better, right?” he said. He is quick to point out that he has an in with Yamayuki, Tokyo’s top tuna broker, which “only deals to the Michelin guys,” and that he began dry-aging fish—a process that enhances both flavor and texture—long before it was fashionable. “We’re out here blazing a trail, and every night someone will go, ‘This is definitely the best sushi in Omaha,’ ” Utterback said. “I don’t even get the state, the region, the surrounding Zip Codes! If we were in New York, if we were in L.A., people wouldn’t say, ‘This is good for L.A.’ They would say, ‘This is one of the best I’ve ever had.’ We never get that. No one’s ever tried to change it.”
Utterback’s parents met on the Japanese island of Okinawa, where his mother was born and where his father was stationed with the U.S. Air Force. They settled in Omaha when Utterback was ten. Utterback’s mother, Hiroko Ota, took cooking cues from her fellow military wives; the family ate a lot of goulash, cottage cheese, and spaghetti, sometimes in a modified yakisoba. “She didn’t really make stuff. She just sort of . . . made stuff out of other stuff,” Utterback recalled. “Nobody was excited about dinner.” Special occasions, though, were almost always celebrated at Sushi Ichiban, a restaurant affiliated with the Unification Church, whose members are known as the Moonies. The Church’s founder, the Korean messiah claimant Sun Myung Moon, was largely responsible for popularizing sushi in the United States, driven by a belief that the seafood industry was a divinely inspired solution to world hunger.
In his twenties, as Utterback dipped in and out of community college and played in punk bands—it’s not hard, even now, to imagine him in a mosh pit, with his buzzed hair and tattooed biceps—he got a job cooking at a restaurant called Blue Sushi Sake Grill. By 2014, he was the head chef of the restaurant group that encompassed Blue and had started to experiment with omakase as a side project. On a trip to Japan a few years earlier, he had eaten at Sukiyabashi Jiro, the Tokyo restaurant that would be made famous by the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.” When Utterback told Jiro Ono and his son that he was a sushi chef from Nebraska, they laughed at him, but also agreed to his request for an internship—so long as he moved to Tokyo for at least three years, ideally a decade. Utterback, who’d just gotten married and bought a house in Omaha, instead devoted himself to learning on his own, poring over books, making regular trips to Japan, and befriending masters of the craft.
